After eight years in the market, it's time for Skoda's successful family notchback to slowly give its place to a brand new Octavia that will make its world premiere sometime next year, either at the Geneva Salon in March or at the Frankfurt Motor Show later on in September.

For the first time, our scoop shooters seized a prototype of the production Octavia Mk3 as the Czech firm's engineers were performing high-speed tests at the Nürburgring track in Germany.

Evidently, it's not east to tell what's going on under the psychedelic-themed camouflage, but we can see that the third generation of Skoda's bread and butter model has a more athletic shape than the current Octavia with a lower front end and a sleeker roofline.

We cannot be completely sure from these images, but it is likely that the new model will keep the Octavia's traditional notchback styling that disguises a hatch tailgate.

The next Octavia will be the first Skoda model to utilize the VW Group's new and extremely flexible platform structure named MQB that underpins vehicles such as the latest VW Golf, Seat Leon and Audi A3, among other cars.

It will also use the same four-cylinder diesel and petrol engines found on the aforementioned models including a 2.0-liter turbocharged four-cylinder unit for the performance RS (vRS in the UK) variant with an output of around 220-horsepower that will be connected to either six-speed manual or DSG dual-clutch transmissions.

The sedan version will be followed up by a replacement for the Estate (station wagon) model.

Due to the addition of the smaller Rapid notchback sedan to Skoda's range, it's believed that the new Octavia will move more upmarket in terms of quality and equipment features and thus, will be priced slightly higher than the current model.